The present invention relates generally to personal assistant and more particularly to natural-language voice-activated personal assistant.
For the past few years, personal assistants have been growing at a phenomenal rate. Several companies, including Palm, Inc. and Handspring, Inc., have successfully entered the market. Their products enhance personal productivity to a certain degree. These personal assistants are computing devices and thus also referred to as “digital assistants.” However, such assistants have weaknesses.
Typically, such assistants are handheld, meaning that they can be held in one's hand or put in a shirt pocket. As time goes by, handheld can even imply a little badge on one's shirt, which sometimes can be referred to as an Internet appliance or wearable computer. These assistants are typically quite small with very small keyboards. As a result, it is not only tedious but also time consuming to interact with such assistants.
One way to attempt to get around the interaction problem is to include a voice-recognition mechanism in the assistant. IBM recently announced that they are contemplating incorporating voice-recognition mechanisms into personal assistants. There are also cellular phones where you can use key words verbally to access phone numbers. However, the key words have to match the names you previously stored in the phone.
Voice-recognition alone is insufficient to solve the interaction problem. Humans can express an idea in so many different ways. For example, after recording his meeting time with Alice into the calendar of an assistant, Joe wants to find out the time of the meeting. He can ask for the information in many ways. Joe may ask, “When is my meeting time with Alice?”, “When should I be meeting Alice?”, “Damn! Should I be meeting Alice tomorrow?” or “Tell me when is Alice meeting me.” Clearly, voice-recognition alone is not sufficient to resolve the different ways of expression and retrieve Joe's meeting time with Alice.
Another issue involved is that human expression can be ambiguous in other ways. For example, Joe can ask, “Meeting Alice?” or “When to meet Alice?”. Such expressions are ambiguous and, strictly speaking, are syntactically incorrect. But the assistant should be able to retrieve the meeting time for Joe, just like a good human assistant can. Such different or ambiguous expressions are common in everyday conversation, and should be expected when one is using his personal assistant to get phone numbers, retrieving to-do list or looking up calendar events.
It should be apparent from the foregoing that voice-recognition software alone is insufficient to make personal assistants or cell phones applicable for common everyday expressions.